[Bonus post that I wrote at the airport last night] I liked this quote from Emotional Design: “Cooperation relies on trust. For a team to work effectively each individual needs to be able to count on team members to behave as expected. Establishing trust is complex, but it involves, among other things, implicit and explicit […]
Category: thoughts
Cognitive subroutines and learning
I was reading Emotional Design by Don Norman the other day, and he was contemplating ways in which we could leverage emotional machines to improve the learning process. This got me kick-started again on thinking about applications of the cognitive subroutines theory that I’ve been playing with. As a side note, I think I’m finally […]
Clay Shirky on cognitive maps
Clay Shirky had an interesting idea in an article over at Many-to-Many, where he divides the world between radial and Cartesian thinkers. Here’s how he makes the distinction: Radial people assume that any technological change starts from where we are now – reality is at the center of the map, and every possible change is […]
Prescriptive context
Picking up on the identity as context post (as an aside, I need to figure out a way to thread posts, like on a bulletin board, except with comments – I’ve got to start doing research on my blogging software options – yes, I know I’ve said that before), it’s time to think about how […]
Identity as context
Picking up on the cognitive subroutine thread, I had another thought yesterday. What is our self, our identity? To some extent, it is the holistic sum of all of our cognitive subroutines. After all, we judge somebody by how they react to different situations. At work, we like to see how people handle pressure. In […]
More thoughts on thin-slicing
I sent off a note to Malcolm Gladwell through his website with the nitpicks I mentioned in my review of Blink, in particular the height study and the Ted Williams story. Much to my surprise, Gladwell wrote me back thanking me for the observations and loving the Ted Williams story. Cool! While thinking about it […]
Cognitive subroutines and context
More thoughts on yesterday’s cognitive subroutines post after thinking about it some more, partially in response to Jofish’s comment. Jofish brings up the importance of leveraging the real world. We don’t have to store a hypothetical model for everything in the real world, because we can use the real world to store information about itself, […]
Cognitive subroutines
This is going to be a relatively long post, mostly inspired by reading Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Sources of Power, by Gary Klein, both books that explain how and why our unconscious decision-making capabilities are often better than our conscious ones, and also explain when such capabilities fail and need to be over-ridden. I […]
Balancing control and autonomy
I previously linked to this New Yorker article on how the army is self organizing to handle the challenges of Iraq. After putting up the link, I had a conversation with a coworker that evoked some more thoughts. One was the observation that the army is composed of units, each of which can be run […]
Jamie Zawinski on groupware
Jamie Zawinski posted a rant about groupware yesterday, pointed to by both Clay Shirky at Many-to-Many and Joel on Software. Zawinski is famous for being one of the first employees of Netscape, and then resigning notoriously. His rant about groupware is worth reading, but I’ll excerpt the lines that particularly caught my attention here. So […]
